President Barack "I Didn't Do It" Obama

But, as in the case of President Obama and sequestration, when the fear of being caught in a lie is removed because those charged with being the entertainers who claim to be “watchdogs” but who are active participants are trusted by a majority of the people as if they actually were watchdogs, then brazenly lying carries no more risk than saying “hello.”

Think, people, of the absurdity of believing people who tell you that they are objective! How could they possibly know that?!! It is not humanly possible.
It is possible, and laudable, to diligently try in good faith to be objective. It is even reasonable to claim to be trying to be objective. But the very first thing you (or anyone else) must do in a good-faith effort to be objective is to examine and confess to any and all identifiable motives and influences which might prevent you from being objective. How, then, can someone who claims actually to beobjective actually even be trying??? They have prejudged the issue in their own favor before the battle was even engaged. You might as well ride a car to the finish line of a marathon race and walk across the finish line, claiming victory before the starting gun has even been fired!
And let us hear nothing of the fatuous conceit that the Constitution charges the press with being “watchdogs.” Freedom is not responsibility, it is authority. There is a difference. It is God, not government, which gives us rights. And it is to God, not government, that we (whether we own a printing press yet or not) are responsible for our exercise of those rights. And if you think that the owner of a press is sinning, well, preach to him. But as far as responsibility to you is concerned, the owner has no more of it than you have to him. Get your own press and give your own opinion in it. In reality that is what FreeRepublic.com is.
Do the people have no recourse at all, then? IMHO the answer to that should properly be no, and I do not mean to imply that I am calling for a change to the Constitution. In fact, laws against libel are on the books, and laws against monopoly are on the books as well. The Associated Press and its membership constitutes a monopoly.

In 1945, the Supreme Court of the United States held in Associated Press v. United States that AP had been violating the Sherman Antitrust Act by prohibiting member newspapers from selling or providing news to nonmember organizations as well as making it very difficult for nonmember newspapers to join the AP. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press
That case came out of Chicago, and was a dispute with the United Press. But more generally,

News Over the Wires:
The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897
by Menahem Blondheim

indicts the AP for monopolistic practices, and more generally yet, any wire service tends to unify and homogenize journalism:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of nations, Book I, Ch 10
. . . and a newswire is nothing but a continuous virtual meeting of all major journalism outlets. The AP needs to be sued for libel whenever it propagates a libelous story. And it propagates libels very routinely. Think, George Zimmerman. Think, the Duke Lacrosse Three. Think, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Think, Rathergate. Think, Sarah Palin. Think, Alar and apples. Think, fracking. Think, Carbon Dioxide. It is scarcely too much to say that journalism exists to promote libel against free institutions and free men, as a way of promoting themselves . . . and other self-promoters. Journalism as a whole, and the Democratic Party, exist to practice on the credulousness of the people, and toexploit the people who make the country work, who get things done - upon whom we most depend.
The rationale of the news service is to minimize the cost of disseminating the news. But satellites and fiber optic lines have by now made the cost of bandwidth for the transmission of news negligible. Consequently the mission of the AP is obsolete, and the AP is not too big to fail.

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